Why Yale is cheaper than ASU for some
An undocumented Arizona high school graduate finds that an Ivy League school is more affordable than staying home
Aranzazu Soto earned a perfect gradepoint average from Xavier College Preparatory, an exclusive private high school in Phoenix where she graduated in May.
She’s the kind of student a university would love to have: driven, sharp, involved in her community.
But the 18-year-old is leaving Arizona soon.
She’s going to Yale University, one of the country’s premier higher education institutions. It will be more affordable for her than any public university in the Grand Canyon
“At the end of the day, I am grateful for the opportunity to challenge myself. But I have to say, it was a disappointment I had to grow past. … My choices that were so close to home were not very feasible.” Aranzazu Soto, Undocumented Arizona high school graduate
State.
Soto is undocumented, one of thousands of Arizona students without legal immigration status who have spent most of their lives here and will graduate from an Arizona high school.
Undocumented students face more barriers to college access than peers who qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a temporary fix that allowed some undocumented youth protection from deportation.
In Arizona, undocumented students can’t get driver’s licenses or work permits.
And they can’t qualify for the less expensive tuition rate at Arizona’s three state universities that’s available to DACA students.
While the plight of DACA students has received significant public attention in recent years, undocumented students typically receive less exposure in debates on immigration reform.
Each year, about 2,000 unauthorized immigrants graduate from Arizona high schools, the tenth-most in the country, according to a report released in May by the Migration Policy Institute. Nationwide, about 98,000 unauthorized immigrants graduate from high school in the U.S. annually, the institute estimated.
Undocumented students “are graduating every year from high school without access to DACA protections, harming their work prospects and limiting their postsecondary education opportunities,” the institute said in its report.
Yale already has shown it will support her, she said. She got emails and calls from students and personalized letters that showed the university understood her situation as a first-generation, undocumented student.
Her scholarship covers all of her needs, including some money that will help her buy winter clothes and dorm necessities.
“I love the community, I love the diversity of personality and talent,” she said.
Of course, she’s excited to go to Yale. There’s no doubt it’s a great opportunity for her.
But most of her friends are staying in Arizona. She’ll be leaving her family for the first time.
“At the end of the day, I am grateful for the opportunity to challenge myself. But I have to say, it was a disappointment I had to grow past. … My choices that were so close to home were not very feasible,” she said.
Because of her immigration status, she would have to pay out-of-state tuition rates at public institutions in Arizona. She can’t access federal student aid programs like Pell grants or federal loans.
At Arizona’s state universities, in-state tuition and fees cost more than $10,000 a year. Out-of-state tuition costs can top $30,000. At the Maricopa Community Colleges, out-of-state tuition is $326 per credit hour; the in-state rate is $85.
“It’s unfortunate, there are a lot of kids that are brought in and they’re totally unaware. And I heard some heartbreaking stories, but again when you look at the whole thing, the whole situation, you can’t just make decisions based on those heartbreaking stories.” Rick Gray,
Arizona Senate Majority Leader
College planning a challenge
Two undocumented teens talked to The Arizona Republic during the past five months as they applied for and chose college paths.
They discussed the challenges of finding colleges where full financial aid was a possibility despite their immigration status. They talked about searching for scholarships that didn’t require citizenship. They told of their desire to give back to their communities by advancing their education.
Sometimes it’s not clear how they can even apply to college, when U.S. student applications may require you to have legal status in the country and international student applications call for an out-of-country address and visa information.
Many scholarships aren’t within reach because they require citizenship or, sometimes, lawful status like that offered through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
DACA, enacted via executive order by then-President Barack Obama in 2012, allows young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to apply for temporary protection from deportation and access work permits.
The Trump administration halted new applicants to DACA in 2017, effectively cutting off young people who would have met the requirements previously. Lawsuits over the program are ongoing.
A 2018 Arizona Supreme Court decision barred DACA students from paying in-state tuition rates at public community colleges and universities here. Enrollment among DACA recipients subsequently plummeted at community colleges.
Arizona’s three state universities created a tuition rate of 150% above in-state costs, or about $15,000, for DACA recipients. Undocumented students don’t qualify for that.
At the state’s community colleges, undocumented students would also pay out-of-state rates, which are three times as expensive as in-state tuition.
There’s no intermediate rate DACA students can access at community colleges, so both DACA and undocumented students pay out-of-state rates.
That often means private colleges are the most reasonable option.
Because they don’t use public funding, private institutions can offer scholarships and discounts to undocumented students. There are few options for such schools in Arizona.
Number of undocumented grads will grow
More and more undocumented young people who would otherwise have been able to receive DACA will be planning for college without its protections in the coming years.
Before the program was stopped, undocumented youth could apply for DACA starting at age 15. Now, while the Trump administration’s decision is embroiled in court battles, DACA renewals are still being processed, but new applicants cannot apply.
Like DACA recipients, many undocumented youth were brought to the U.S. as children and have spent most of their lives in the country.
In Arizona, lawmakers tried this year to come up with a tuition rate for undocumented students who graduated from high school here. The measure did not succeed in the Legislature, despite an attempt to revive it.
Staying in Arizona, but leaving public schools
Juan Carlos Cisneros is staying here.
He’s undocumented, but doesn’t qualify for DACA because he came to the U.S. about a year after the cutoff for DACA eligibility.
He and his mother came to the U.S. from Mexico in 2008. His mother was fleeing an abusive husband.
The 17-year-old, who just graduated from Bioscience High School in Phoenix, plans to attend Benedictine University in Mesa and major in computer science this fall.
He got into all three public state universities, but would have to essentially pay full out-of-state tuition at them if he chose to attend.
At Benedictine, he’s received multiple institutional scholarships to help him cover the cost.
He applied to more than a dozen colleges outside Arizona, many of them private. He’s also applied for tons of scholarships.
Several of Cisneros’ friends who have DACA or are undocumented plan to leave Arizona for college, he said.
“We’re all applying to really, really high-ranking schools just to try to get by because we can’t do it with state-funded education,” Cisneros said.
He received poor grades during his earlier years in high school.
He kept hearing he couldn’t go to college because he was undocumented, so why try?
“I let that stuff sway me, so I just kind of gave up in high school essentially,” he said.
Though his grades improved the past two years, those early stumbles affected his GPA, and his ability to get into more selective schools and receive scholarships.
Cisneros wants a college degree to get a good job that will pay enough for a surgery for himself. He was born with a chest indentation that makes breathing difficult. Without surgery, the indentation becomes a more serious problem starting around age 25, he said.
He also wants to contribute to society, to help people. He’s volunteered after school for years, teaching robotics to younger kids.
“I know I’ll get my education somehow. I don’t know how, but I will get it,” he said. “Because I really want to help out other people and cause change.”
Can the law be changed?
At least 18 states have laws or policies that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Six states allow undocumented students to receive state financial aid.
Only three states, including Arizona, prohibit undocumented students from accessing in-state tuition. Georgia and Indiana are the others.
In Georgia, undocumented students are banned from attending the top three public universities.
And two states, Alabama and South Carolina, don’t allow undocumented students to attend any public higher education institutions, no matter what they pay.
Proposition 300, approved by Arizona voters in 2006, requires people to have “lawful immigration status” to receive public benefits, and specifically lists instate tuition as a public benefit.
A measure sponsored this year by Republican Sen. Heather Carter of Cave Creek attempted to provide a path for DACA and undocumented students to pay less at public colleges.
The bill would have directed Arizona’s public universities and community colleges to create a new tuition rate for all students who graduate from Arizona high schools, including those without legal status in the U.S.
It didn’t pass.
Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray, R-Sun City, said he voted against the bill because it tried to circumvent voters, who overwhelmingly supported Proposition 300 in 2006.
He had students come to his office and some argued that people’s minds have changed since then.
If that’s true, he said, a measure for in-state tuition for DACA and undocumented students should go back to the voters.
“The only appropriate way to really address this issue is going back to the ballot again,” he said.
Gray said he’s frustrated by how immigration as a whole has not been addressed at the federal level, including border security and illegal immigration.
“It’s unfortunate, there are a lot of kids that are brought in and they’re totally unaware. And I heard some heartbreaking stories, but again when you look at the whole thing, the whole situation, you can’t just make decisions based on those heartbreaking stories,” Gray said.
He doesn’t believe Arizona should spend money on non-citizens. He thinks it could “reward” people who come across the border illegally and negatively affect U.S. citizens.
“We’ve got enough people that we need to take care of,” he said.
Students advocate for themselves
Soto and Cisneros both have advocated for changes to Arizona law to provide more higher education options for DACA and undocumented students in Arizona.
They’re part of Aliento, an organization that advocates for undocumented youth and supports in-state rates for them and DACA students.
Reyna Montoya, the group’s founder and CEO, was undocumented when she got her undergraduate degree from ASU in 2012, then got DACA later that year.
Montoya said the state is losing a generation of young people without immigration status who are motivated and driven to succeed.
“We’re losing talent, we’re losing money. … For a lot of students I work with, they see Arizona as home,” Montoya said.
She commended the young undocumented students who have advocated for themselves and their communities, despite the potential risk.
“The dynamics change when you share who you are because now they’re seeing a person, no longer a statistic,” Montoya said.
Cisneros spent several days this year at the Arizona Legislature, meeting with lawmakers and telling his story in hopes they would make it easier for undocumented students to go to college.
The state is losing smart young people who it has already paid to educate through the K-12 system, they argue.
“For students like myself and others who want to continue their education, there shouldn’t be like extra obstacles just because we don’t have a piece of paper that says we are from here,” Soto said.
“Because at the end of the day, we all want the same thing for our future. We all want to be able to be the writers of our own path. And that’s not possible when we’re not given the same tools to make that path.”